1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computer storage and information systems.
2. Description of Related Art
According to recent trends, ever-increasing amounts of digital data are being stored in computer storage systems, such as disk array systems, which use magnetic disk drives to store large quantities of data. For example, a digital archive storage system must store substantial amounts of digital data, such as email, user files, images of bank checks, medical X-ray images, and so on, for various purposes, such as meeting regulatory compliance standards, guarding against legal action, or the like. When a company needs to manage massive quantities of data of this nature over a long period time, special purpose storage systems for data archiving are often used to reduce total data management costs.
These archive storage systems have several management functions to store and manage a large amount of data safely over long periods of time. For example, some archive storage systems are able to search data which contains keywords specified by users, prevent data from being deleted or altered, and detect data corruption caused by degradation of the storage media during long-term retention. Some archive storage systems also enable exporting or importing contents of the archives to or from an external system, such as a backup system. Such systems may include a digital signature that ensures that the content imported to the external system or imported to the archive system has not been altered since the content was originally exported from the archive system or exported from the external system, respectively.
Related art includes U.S. Pat. No. 7,155,466, to Rodriguez et al., entitled “Policy-Based Management of a Redundant Array of Independent Nodes,” the entire disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.